When I was growing up in Compton, California, there were no alternatives to the failing school system in my community.

If my parents felt that the school was substandard, they had no other option because they were limited in income and could not send me to a private school with better resources. Unlike wealthy parents in other neighborhoods, parents in poor neighborhoods did not have the option of sending their children to a private school. Instead, parents – including my own - would often resort to using fake addresses by paying for utility bills at friends’ homes in middle-class neighborhoods so that their children would be admitted into public schools with better resources. However, many parents did not have this option as they did not have the friends in good neighborhoods to support them in this effort. In this case, they were forced to send their kids to failing public schools, like so many parents in poor neighborhoods.  In doing so, they thereby denied their children a good education–one of the best chances of escaping poverty.

Education has been adversely affected by the fact that the government holds a monopoly over public school systems throughout the United States. Vouchers - unlike any other education reform proposal – attacks this problem in education at its heart: it eliminates the government monopoly aspect of our education system.  If a public school knows that students have nowhere else to go, and it is not held accountable, it has no real incentive to improve. Continuing to pour more money into complacent school systems will not inspire productive change.

Opponents of vouchers often talk about the need for patience with the current system. They argue that if we allocate another million dollars to public schools, then schools will improve. However, we have already funneled millions of dollars into the public school system. Education failure has been a ‘national tragedy’ since the early 1960’s and 70’s. Legislators have tried everything to improve the quality of public schools, from a dramatic rise in funding to stricter test requirements. Yet the quality of schools, especially in poor neighborhoods, has not significantly improved. How much more patient should we have before we say, enough is enough - we need to try something different?

History has shown monopolies to be especially bad for consumers and government monopolies to be even worse, yet opponents of vouchers continue to defend a government monopoly in education. All the while, another generation of Latinos is being robbed of the one tool that would allow them to escape poverty. Vouchers are needed now; social justice demands no less.

Alfonso Trujillo blogs at Hispanic Pundit.  He lives in San Diego.